Page 7 of The Assassin
Eli returned, his Braves hoodie matching my cap and keeping him warm in the cool hospital halls. I clapped a hand on his shoulder and steered him toward the elevator. “Let’s take a walk.”
The cafeteria was busy. Dinnertime. We grabbedEli a burger and took it outside where there was more privacy.
“What’d you find out?” He took a massive bite of his burger like he was starving. He might have been. This was his first meal since…
I looked away. Would I ever want to eat again?
“A name. Derrick Roslyn.”
Eli grunted. “A damn politician. Why am I not surprised?”
Like I’d said… “That last contract—”
“The one with the truckerguy?”
“The one that made zero sense. That was him too.” We hadn’t known, hadn’t cared. Who the target was? Yeah. The client wasn’t important as long as they paid the fee we required.
Eli stared down at what was left of his sandwich, then tossed it into a nearby trash can. “Fuckin’ A.”
“Yeah.”
“So he sent someone to take us out because we—”
“Because he’s an egomaniac who thinks he can actwith impunity. Not because of anything we did or didn’t do. This was all on him.”
And me. I hadn’t protected them well enough.
Eli turned to face me, his stare digging deep. “You’re going after him.”
I’d never struggled to meet my brother’s eyes, but now my own wanted to drop; I wasn’t sure why. “I’m going to make sure you and Remi never have anything to worry about ever again.” And I intendedto make an example of the man who’d dared to come after us.
“Levi…Remi needs you here.Ineed you here. Roslyn can wait until Remi is out of the woods.”
“Can he?” I shook my head. “We can’t control the flow of intel in a public space, and there are far too many public spaces involved in taking care of Remi right now. If we can’t control our end, we need to control his.”
Though that wasn’t theonly reason; Eli knew it as well as I did. There was blood in the water. The motherfucker had dared to come after The Assassin. If we let that stand, we would never know peace.
Publicly and privately, retribution was a given. Remi’s accident just determined timing.
Adingsounded from Eli’s wrist. He glanced at it. “They’ll allow us to visit soon. Just a few minutes, but…” He took a shaky breath.“You should be the one to go in.”
Back upstairs, Eli sat in the waiting room while I followed a nurse back to Remi’s cubicle. The first glimpse of him sucked all the air from my body. There was white everywhere—the walls, the sheets, the pillows, the bright lights that tried to blind you. Against that backdrop his skin looked a sallow, sickly yellow. His hair was all over the place, and I hadto fight the impulse to smooth it down, especially with the bandages creeping up from the back of his head. An IV and cords and lines I didn’t recognize crisscrossed his body, leading to equipment standing sentinel around the bed. He was the tallest, the most muscular of the three of us, and yet in the hospital bed with his eyes sunken and a tube stuck down his throat to help him breathe, he wasdiminished somehow. The power animating his body had disappeared.
Because he was walking the line between living and dying.
He could die. And there wasn’t jack shit I could do about it.
I walked forward as if tiptoeing through a church sanctuary on crushed glass. “Remi.”
A glance at the heart monitor showed a steady rhythm, no blip of recognition. I moved closer.
“Hey, bro.”
The steel railalong the side of the bed felt icy beneath my grasping fingers. I clenched my fists around it, fighting to stay upright and off my knees.
“You’re not supposed to be in here, you know.” I cleared my nearly closed throat. “This was never supposed to happen. Not to you.”
I’d accepted long ago that it might happen to me. Remi and Eli would go on together; they had each other.
